Is downscaling that horrible?

I'm teetering on the edge of buying a WUXGA laptop (the T61p) that I will intend to use for some gaming. Everyone always talks about downscaling to 1440 or 1280 like it's the most horrible thing in the world. If I had any games installed on this PC I'd test it myself, but in my casual experience (from what I can remember) it wasn't that bad. Is there anyone that can show or describe the major differences between, say, 1280 or 1440 native and downscaled from something like 1680? Is it something that only a truly hardcore gamer would care about?

Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

 

in gaming, i submit that downscaling isn't that bad because everything on the screen is always changing so you don't notice that much.

downscaling for normal use is much worse because almost everything is static so the blurry effect is much more apparent.

i have a wuxga and don't notice the downscaling at all in gaming (HL2, NFS:MW, RE4), but i would never run non-native res for normal usage.

 

I'd play games in windowed move for 1680x1050, 1400x900, and 1200x800. Everything is mushy and nebulous if you allow the game to stretch itself across more pixels. For some games this isn't critical, but even for those games, you lose the fine detail.

 

Pretty much exactly what I needed to hear. I'm perfectly fine with windowed mode (prefer it sometimes, actually) and if I REALLY needed to see every grain of sand in Crysis I'd throw an 8800GTX in a desktop and call it a day. For the rest of the time, I want as much screen space as possible and I'm cool with upping my DPI/font size to compensate.

Thanks so much. I feel better now.

 

lol 1 8800GTX, try 4.


But yeah when I play games on my laptop, the only one I can run that goes up to 1440x900 is WoW, and when I don't run it fullscreen it looks fine at the lower res, if somebody cared about it that much they would go with the SLI 8800m GTX's.

 

I`m downscaling all the new games. My screen is a WUXGA, but in order to play some games like Medal Of Honor Airborne at 1920x1200, I have to make a mixture or low/med settings and I can`t have that. So I run 1280x800 all high and get 30-60 fps
Downscaling should always be made in the same aspect ratio as the screen. If it`s a wuxga 1920x1200,then your typical resolutions for gaming should be as follow: 1680x1050 , 1440x900,1280x800,1024x640.

 

eleron911 is on the right track.

while downscaling (or really... upscaling, i think you are all thinking about this backwards) can make the image slightly blurry... the effect is not that bad in game.

however, changing the aspect ratio will create obvious image distortion.

so just keep your ratio at 16:10 and you'll be set.

 

Downscaling isn't bad everyone has to do it. I do it to get better performance out of games. I like eyecandy too. a 1920*1200 res is fun, but its butt ugly when you have to set everything to med/low settings. I like to keep some power in reserve for more demanding scenes in games. My XPS M170 can run HL2 at 1920*1200 and at high settings. But as soon as you get in a huge firefight with special effects, man it turns into a slide show.

 

The last games I was able to max out on my laptop were GTA San Andreas, Painkiller and Painkiller battler out of hell and any game before 2005,and some rares 2006s. Any game after game is forcing me to reduce either resolution or details to get above 30 fps which is a MUST for me.
That`s why I`ve played Crysis on 1280x800 and med/high details(med shaders and shadows)...
But as stated, 16:10 aspect ratio will keep things looking ok. Granted, a games looks amazing at native resolution, but WUXGA means also a lot of real estate, full HD resolution and less chance to be bothered by a dead pixel

 

As everyone already mentioned, keep the aspect ratio the same and things will looks pretty decent. They wont look perfect, but you'll only notice the distortion if you have two screens side-by-side, one at native and one at a decreased resolution. Even then, as long as you keep the aspect ratio constant, the picture will just look smaller.

That said, I find that at 1440x900 using an 8600m GT, things run well at native resolution. Crysis/World in Conflict are the only blatent exceptions in my mind.

Source games should run well in almost any case.
<3 to Valve

 

It's not the worst ting, but it is a bad thing, the level of which depends on your tastes. Just like nylons or vaseline on the lense of a camera, it softens the image, and that is a good or bad thing depending on the quality of the models.

If you love using high quality textures and AF to make your games look sharper then interpolation is going to suck for you because it soften everything in the interpolation. Of course if you try and run high quality textures and full resolution it'll definitel be a very sharp but very slow slide show in many newer titles which is no better.

The nice thing about QUXGA versus other off resolutions is that it scales perfectly to 960x540 without interpolation. so once you get your game to support that resolution you don't have the nasty effects of intepolation. Of course now the pixels are larger since they are now composed of 4 instead of one.

In some games interpolation is more noticeable than others, just like the effect of AA or AF are more noticable. The main thing will be what you find enoyable. I will suffer interpolation for a game I love, however for those where it's annoying I will play with an external monitor if it gets too much.